FLUIDITY

Chapter:

CHAPTER 9 Slavs as Subjects and Citizens

Source:

MUSIC IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

Various reasons for its separate popularity, especially with non-Czech audiences, are not difficult to surmise. It makes virtuosic
use of some very traditional, widely accepted representational devices; its program, or sequence of events, is represented
in the music in an unusually straightforward, descriptive fashion; and its style, while never actually quoting a Czech folk
song, is of a marked (and for Smetana, atypical) popular character that appeals to foreign audiences by virtue of its exoticism,
the reverse side of the nationalist coin. Yet where patriotic symbolism is concerned, the famous main theme of Vltava is heavily fraught with irony, both on the producing and on the consuming ends.

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 9 Slavs as Subjects and Citizens. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Nineteenth Century. New York, USA.
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